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Gigs are a confusing place to be when you experience any form of dissociation. For me, there are two likely outcomes. Sometimes I feel the barriers between me and everything else reduce, so I feel closer to seeing the world as a typical person does. But sometimes I instead feel more aware of the dissonance between what I’m perceiving and what I’m experiencing, and so I notice those barriers more acutely.

A few weeks ago, I read a science journalism internship advertised on a sci-comm mailing list. The internship seemed like a good fit in terms of hours and responsibilities- it included adapting published articles into lay summaries, something I would be interested in. However, the company focused on bioscience and lab science, which I’ve not studied. I could understand the lay versions, but I couldn’t clearly grasp the original articles. So I never applied for that internship, as my biosciences knowledge currently isn’t strong enough.

Thinking about this let me better articulate a background worry/fear that’s been present since I finished my course: that I don’t have a strong enough science background to take part in many aspects of scicomm.Continue reading

Trigger Warning: This whole post is about themes of suicidal thoughts and responses to them. There isn’t anything graphic or too detailed, but don’t read this post if that theme’s not a good idea for you.

I have a strange history with the word inevitable. One one hand, it’s a warning sign. It’s the red flag which warns me I’m about to lose days to the thoughts rattling around my head and blocking everything I care about. When I start to believe that returning to the past is inevitable, that failure is guaranteed while everything good that’s happened since was just temporary solace- that’s how I know a bad time is imminent. When things are bad, the word inevitable gets lodged in my mind, poisoning everything I experience. But at one point, the phrase “delaying the inevitable” was the most helpful thing I’d heard for months.

It’s been a weird few weeks; I’ve ended up with my thoughts going down a lot of familiar bad paths. I’m hoping some of the thoughts are just because of the time of year- around the time of the worst parts happening I tend to get caught up in them.

Anniversary doesn’t feel like the right word, but I don’t know what to use instead. A day where time makes no sense, and the last four years fold down into seconds. Where I remember everything I did and felt as if I was doing it again, a feeling so absorbing that for a while I want to re-enact it. I have two of them, and one is today.Continue reading

I finally got a phonecall back from the CMS, but it really wasn’t the phonecall I expected.

In the last appointment, C3 seemed like she understood what I meant and was happy to talk to her team about sorting out what I can do next. But the phonecall was a lot more negative

Firstly, she said that she didn’t want to progress further as I only met some of the criteria and not others. Considering depersonalisation disorder (which is what I explained was the closest thing I could see to my experiences, and what I wanted to focus on) is basically defined by experiencing depersonalisation that causes negative effects and isn’t caused by anything else- in other words, exactly what I experience, and what I tried to explain to her is probably the thing underlying everything else- I don’t really see how she could have reached that conclusion.

Yesterday, Xbox sent out round-up emails with stats about our year in Xbox. Usually, I’m interested in that kind of thing, but reading these stats was uncomfortable.

I’m in the top 5% for amount played, at about 1500 hours in 2015. I honestly didn’t expect to be that high a percentile, more like 15/20%. That number annoys me- at least 1/3 of those hours happened as deliberate escapism or inertia. What could I have done with them instead?Continue reading

Yesterday, I finally had my appointment with C3.
Leading up to yesterday, I’ve been nervous about going back, more so than if I was seeing a stranger. The nerves are mostly from not knowing how she would interpret me, based on her unexpected assessment last time. Because all I remembered from before was the more negative parts, like the conversations I ended up confused by and L’s reaction to meeting her, I was expecting a bad experience. Instead she was friendly, and she remembered me to some extent; asking about church and uni.